ONE-TWENTY TWO: Trading Financial Markets
Exploring the poetry in financial markets for students of money and economy since the year 2000.
The seasonal trade on home builders for 2017/2018 showed its first sign of trouble when the iShares US Home Construction (ITB) fell sharply off its 10+ year high in January on the same day the S&P 500 (SPY) set a new (and its last) all-time high. Almost two weeks later, in early February, the under-performance … Read more
On Friday, The iPath Bloomberg Cocoa SubTR ETN (NIB) soared 3.0% to a 14-month high. It was a breakout the validated months and months of patience betting that in a market with strong demand, extremely low cocoa prices would create the conditions for higher prices in the future. While NIB has persistently rallied since the … Read more
AT40 = 27.1% of stocks are trading above their respective 40-day moving averages (DMAs) AT200 = 44.4% of stocks are trading above their respective 200DMAs VIX = 19.6 Short-term Trading Call: neutral (caveats below!) Commentary President Trump has been talking about taking unilateral trade actions since he was campaigning in 2016. The rhetoric heated up … Read more
For the first time since at least 2008, speculators flipped bearish on silver. Source: Oanda’s CFTC’s Commitments of Traders Speculative net contracts have trended downward for about a year and approached zero in December around the time the Federal Reserve last hiked rates. Yet, I did not think it was “possible” for positioning to go … Read more
The last Housing Market Review covered data reported in January, 2018 for December, 2017. At the time, I described the ominous breakdown of the iShares U.S. Home Construction ETF (ITB), but I was not yet ready to connect the dots on the bearish implications. I am now. ITB has continued its breakdown by first severely … Read more